Bex O’Brian

Word Count 929

The summer plan was in place. My father would drive a hundred miles from our log cabin in the Eastern Townships into Montreal each morning for work, marooning my mother, my little sister, and me with no car, no phone, no electricity, on eighty acres of wild mountain top.

This was 1970; the lovely lake a mere three miles away still hadn’t received funds to clean up the mounds of toxic sludge created by a century of industrial farming, and human waste. So swimming was off the table even if we could muster the energy to walk the sun-beaten hilly miles of a dirt road while battling biting deer flies.

My mother was forty-two, I was ten, and my kid sister was barely two years old. We were hardly a cohesive group that could find common ground over long lingering boozy lunches. Though that didn’t stop my mother. Party of one. I spent most of the day flopping from one aluminum chaise to another, moaning, “There’s nothing to do!” As for Sophie, she was reasonably entertained eating whatever crawled past her.

As the summer progressed, things turned dire. The three of us started to forgo bathing since it was such a horrible ordeal of crouching under the well pump that spewed freezing water. The day’s high point, lunch, became a desultory affair with mother wafting her hand trying to keep the flies off the food and out of her wine. A few days of the week, she still needed to pound out her weekly column for the Montreal Gazette, so Sophie and I were left to fend for ourselves. 

Come evening, my father’s car would rumble up the rutted road. He must have felt so loved as we would all rush to meet him. But it was really just the thrill of seeing another human’s face. Afterward, he would take great pleasure walking “the grounds.” This was when our failings would become most apparent. In our heat-induced stupor, we forgot to hide the evidence of our misspent days. Mother’s bottle of wine lay on the grass by the hammock on which she had lulled her afternoon away. My wind-blown, rain-swollen, oft-read Archie, Josie and Pussy Cats, not to mention True Romance comic books, were strewn about. And then there were Sophie’s toys, pink, plastic, innumerable. Our detritus sent my father into a rage. His pastoral splendour sullied by the few entertainments which kept us from collectively committing suicide.

After  a couple of drinks he, flush with lost possibilities, wanted to know why we hadn’t thought to build bird boxes or forged a path up to Bex’s Rock? Being British, naming things came with the territory. As much as I liked a rock named after me, battling bramble, snakes, and mosquitos to create a path held no appeal. My father’s shoulders would slump. We weren’t pioneers, naturalists, explorers, builders, gardeners or  birders; we were useless. In my defense, I could climb a tree.

That summer, the already deep cracks in my parent’s marriage began to widen, a fact of which I was keenly aware. They would hang on a couple more years before mercifully putting it and us out of our misery. But at ten, I still wanted a whole, happy family. One night, while lying in bed—the cabin had one room upstairs with four brass beds, and a large room downstairs—I could hear my parent’s conversation.

“You were the one who always said you had nothing to play with but a lump of coal. I give you nearly a hundred acres, and all you do is complain.”

“That lump of coal was one; a metaphor and two; in the East End of London all you’d have to do is open the damn door and there was a fucking great city.” After a moment, she said. “Things wouldn’t be so bad if Bex weren’t such a whiny thing. We could have fun.”

I couldn’t imagine what my mother would think was fun, but I knew what she was doing; she was blaming me. The whole rotten endless summer was my fault because I hadn’t taken to nature, didn’t build bird boxes or lift rotting logs, and marvel at the citadel of bugs living out their ordered lives. I needed to do all those things so when my father came back at night, she could say, “You’ll never guess! Up nice and early, our clever daughter first did some amazing research on how log cabins were built without nails! Very impressive. Then she took Sophie to hunt for Indian arrowheads. After lunch, she got into a fascinating call and response with a black cap chickadee! Now she’s whipped up a lovely salad of dandelion leaves.”

The strange thing was, knowing what she was up to didn’t take away my desire to please her and my father. I fell asleep determined to wake up an entirely different human being.

First thing, I was bright and cheerful. I did my sister’s hair up in a high ponytail and then mine the same way. We dressed. Not old filthy t-shirts but clean clothes. I made the bed, and we had breakfast. More than pleased by this dumbshow, my mother smiled as I took Sophie by the hand and led her outdoors. We walked with purpose into a field, and there I stopped. It was not even seven a.m.; the whole day yawned. For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened next, but that feeling, that dread of time, has never left me.

Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother.